Packwood House

Packwood is all about yew. The Yew Garden holds more than 100 trees, some now over 50 feet tall, and they are said to represent the Sermon on the Mount. Twelve great yews are the Apostles, the four large ones in the middle are the Evangelists, and the crowd of smaller trees, planted in the 19th century where an orchard once stood, are the Multitude. You enter by raised steps and a wrought-iron gate, and the scale of the clipped shapes hits you straight away.

Follow the path up the avenue to The Mount, a hummock climbed by a tight spiral path lined with box. At the top a single yew, The Master, shelters a wooden seat, and from here you look back over the whole Yew Garden to the house. It is the best spot to understand the design and to take photographs. The garden sits on heavy clay, which is hard on the trees in wet spells, so parts may be closed while restoration work is carried out.

Gardeners will find ideas in how bold, simple shapes can carry a whole garden, and in the patient clipping it takes to keep them crisp. Packwood's borders have drawn attention too, including a 2007 Guardian piece by Andy Sturgeon on the late summer border. Leave time for the timber-framed house, filled with tapestries and 16th and 17th-century furniture collected by Graham Baron Ash, who also linked the great barn to the house with a Long Gallery in 1931.